Articles Tagged "Geoffrey Lean"

Climate change scientists acknowledge that the decline in rapid temperature increases is a positive sign

All right, I accept that this Arctic April may seem an incongruous time to address global warming. But there are important, and possibly hopeful, developments in the complex, contentious world of climate science that might finally give us all a sense of spring. For some recent research suggests that climate change might not be as catastrophic as the gloomiest predictions suggest.

The research, moreover, comes at a time when many experts are beginning to despair that warming can be prevented from running out of control. Six weeks ago, for example, Prof Sir Robert Watson – the deeply respected former chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – said he believed the world had now missed its chance to keep the average rise in global temperature to less than 2C – the level at which dangerous effects are thought inevitable. But if the new research is right, it might be held below this ominous threshold after all, if determined worldwide action is taken.

Prediction, as they say, is tough, especially when it’s about the future – and that’s especially true when it comes to the climate, whose complexity we only partially understand. It is, as we all know, naturally immensely variable. And the effect of human intervention is subject to long timelags: it will be decades, even centuries, before the full consequences of today’s emissions of carbon dioxide become clear.

As climate-change talks get under way, negotiators are filled with a sense of foreboding.

Maybe the name has something to do with it – Cancun means “nest of serpents” in the original Indian language of the area – but it would have been hard to pick a less propitious place to host a conference widely hailed as the last chance to get international negotiations to combat climate change back on track.

For this Mexican resort has an unrivalled record in consigning such talks to the compost heap of history. In 1981 it was here, at one of Ronald Reagan’s first summits, that global negotiations on tackling world poverty went off the rails, even if it was the intransigence of developing countries rather than the old ham himself that was to blame. Beside these same azure seas 20 years later, the current round of world trade talks went awry and have yet to recover.

A sense of foreboding is one of the few points of general agreement among the 15,000 participants congregating for the next two weeks on this long thin strip of land, marooned between a wide lagoon and the Caribbean Sea. Jairem Ramesh, the Indian environment minister, sees it as the “last chance” for climate change talks to succeed; Connie Hedegaard, the EU’s climate chief, believes a disappointing outcome would “put the whole process in danger”; and American and Canadian politicians are thinking of moving negotiations to other, more selective, meeting places. No wonder Chris Huhne, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, says that Britain’s main goal over the next two weeks will be “keeping the show on the road”.

Is this some really good news about climate change? One of its most worrying manifestations has long been the shrinking of the polar ice cap in summer. Concern reached unprecedented heights two and a half years ago when over 200,000 square miles were found to have melted for the first time, bringing the extent of the ice cap in September 2007 down to levels that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s models had predicted would not be reached before 2050.

Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado - probably the world’s leading institution in the field – then said that they feared that the ice had entered a ‘death spiral’. And, even though the extent of the ice has recovered somewhat in the succeeding two Septembers (always the month with the least amount after the summer heat) many experts still believed that a ‘tipping point’ had been reached, with some suggesting that the Arctic could be ice-free in summer as early as 2013. This, others added, could have catastrophic worldwide effects, including disrupting the Indian monsoon and causing prolonged drought in the American Mid-West, which helps feed over 100 countries worldwide.

But now reports of new research, due to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggest that much of the loss of ice may not be directly caused by global warming after all. They say that the research – led by Masayo Ogi of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokohama, Japan – has found that changes in wind patterns account for about half of the variation in September ice cover. In the years of higher loss, the scientists found, the winds blew large amounts of ice south through the Fram Strait between Greenland and the Svarlbard Archipeligo to melt in the warmer waters of the North Atlantic.

It is time for the embattled Rajendra Pachauri to resign as Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC). He is steadfastly refusing to go, but his position is becoming more and more untenable by the day, and the official climate science body will continue to leach credibility while he remains in charge.

When on Friday I wrote for my Daily Telegraph column (published yesterday) that he was “at best one more blunder away from having to resign”, I did not expect other errors to come to light quite so fast. But, as I blogged yesterday, four more have now been reported from the part of the latest IPCC report on Himalayan glaciers that contained the notorious – and now withdrawn - claim that they would disappear by 2035. And there are now reports that it erred in relying on an unpublished report in linking natural disasters like flood and hurricanes to global warming. All appear much less serious than the original Himalayan howler, but they add to the impression of sloppiness at the IPCC.

Pachauri’s reaction to the original revelation was widely reported to be that he claimed to have “absolutely no responsibility” for the mistake. But – leaving aside the obvious fact that, as Chairman, he is ultimately responsible for the content and standards of the report – he is himself rapidly emerging as much more of an issue than even a few errors in the 3000 word document. Much of his trouble, rightly, stems from his outrageous reaction to an Indian paper late last year which suggested that the glaciers were not vanishing quickly – dismissing it as “voodoo science” and adding, hubristically: “We have a very clear idea of what is happening in the Himalayas.”

Well, you’ve got to hand it to them. Fresh from its wash-out “barbecue summer” the Met Office is predicting that next year is likely to be the warmest one ever, exceeding 1998, which holds the present record.

The logic is that there is forecast to be an El Nino, which always heats things up, next year as in 1998: if it is a strong as it was then, the extra amount of greenhouse gases that have accumulated over the intervening 12 years should ensure a record year. But if – as after a similar forecast for 2007 – the El Nino does not materialise or turns out to be weak, the Met Office will be left with egg on its face again,and sceptics will have a field day.

But just suppose the forecast turns out to be right. What will the sceptics do then? At the heart of their case is a claim that the world is cooling down - based on fixing the starting point in the anomalously warm 1998 and drawing a line from there, even though beginning in 1997 or 1999 would give very different results. Statisticians have condemned the practice, but they have gone on with it.